


A Lamentable Account Of The Impossible Connexion Between Anacharsis CLOOTZ and Edmund BURKE; and other stories

by PlinytheYounger



Category: 18th Century CE RPF
Genre: F/M, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-15
Updated: 2015-09-15
Packaged: 2018-04-21 00:02:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 1,120
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4807280
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlinytheYounger/pseuds/PlinytheYounger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Various 18th Century HPF, featuring revolutionary firebrands, anti-revolutionary firebrands, philosophical kings arguing with ironical authors, and philosophical enlighteners and ironical playwrights being the best of (Drift-compatible) friends.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

A thousand years and no new Otho’s tried  
to save their honour by a suicide, convinced they’d fix  
the gory shambles of their politics. Better to learn:  
On each shoulder sits the unavoidable clerk  
listing the good, the evil works. Nothing can be undone  
by nothingness; nor even by pain. Still Rome burnt  
and Galba rotted, and the armies lay  
in aimless and unnecessary mounds of clay.  
So, setting aside the book-burning, the house arrest,  
listen: no one’s going to be that impressed.  
(They certainly won’t think you died for liberty!)  
Stranger things have happened than a victory  
and losing everything leaves more to lose.  
Worse always to be dead, and doomed to refuse  
all struggle and striving. My attempted friend,  
my hypocrite and bloodied humanist, the end  
is sheer futility. A whirl of atoms or a breathless shade  
whose mechanism’s all unwound, watching that sad parade  
of human folly and malignance. Do enjoy Candide:  
life’s a bitch, but no one’s really through with it  
not even a galley slave or – worse – a Jesuit.  
Lay down your poison flask for compromise:  
Glory sickens on peace; but humans can thrive  
on the ignoble business of staying alive.


	2. Burke-Sempai Fails To Notice Jean-Baptise val de Clootz, 1784 - 1794

Long live the Republic of the World!  
shouts Anacharsis Cloots, one-time Prussian baron,  
hurrah for the fraternity of nations!

Anacharsis is the hero of a novel  
who embarks on philosophical voyages  
the Scythian philosopher in Athens  
here to observe the city of the free.

Jean-Baptiste Clootz is a bad student  
at the military academy in Berlin  
and a poor servant of a fighting king  
who takes flight at twenty-one for England,  
and there has the privilege to stay  
with a great politician of his age:

At Gregories he learns  
of Double-Cabinets and Cabals  
of England top-heavy with its King  
who teeters over Parliament’s debates  
and tugged hither-thither by intrigue  
collapses upon the Opposition  
and squeezes them to death.

My dear Edmund Burke, he writes,  
how long we talked and talked into the night  
of the great interests of humankind!

Come, come, my dear Burke, to France:  
here are no more abuses, no more aristocracy,  
civil freedom, religious freedom, equality!

Here is the tribune of the universe  
for all those suffering and oppressed;  
open the cage, the bird flies free!

Burke in hock for his lovely house  
considers the speculative benevolence  
of men who wish they could possess  
a society entirely different from that state,  
however poorly ordered, in which they live.  
Beyond reality isfolly, vice and madness  
without tuition or restraint.

The cold Channel runs between them  
as Fox weeps in the House of Lords  
and Clootz dreams of a country without walls.

God pours cold water on the Champs-du-Mars  
God is aristocratic; but Clootz  
brings the deputies of humankind  
from Spain to Persia, to join the French  
in making the People their God instead.

Terrible intrigues of the Austrian army.  
Clootz cries out with Brissot:

The peaceful Republic of Letters  
shall be our Kingdom here on earth  
when we first annexe Belgium and Savoy:  
let us strike the first decisive blow  
let us spread the Constitution with the cannon!

The mouths of rifles will proclaim  
the international Rights of Man.

From Pondichéri and St-Domingue  
to Cleves, Lisbon and the Savoy  
no difference in climate or complexion  
silences the voice of humanity  
which preaches one democratic nation  
longed for by all, all, all!

Burke sees a curtain fall  
upon all the dignity of the earth,  
at this terrible, regicidal peace -  
to see ambassadors really treat with France!  
His fanatic friend would not have dared this!  
Pity that Cloots had no reprieve  
from the guillotine - no, none - 

Foreign powers have in our midst

their spies. Cloots is a Prussian.  
I have told you his political history.

Deliver your verdict. So they did.

Burke in the English parliament  
stoking the great bellows of Fear & War  
dismisses in one breath the leader  
of the bare-breeched corps  
the orator of the naked posteriors!

On the scaffold, Monsieur Cloots  
bows four times to the four quarters  
of the world, and out  
of history.


	3. The Poet's Most Excellent Adventure With Edmund Burke

I dreamt I took a walk with Edmund Burke  
where the second runway lays its concrete shroud  
the pigs were glad to see us and nuzzled  
incessantly at our shins in their wattled pen.  
Meltwater gravel played over the hilt  
of a bronze-tanged dagger. Despite the mist  
the black turf of the hearth caught eager light  
I breathed the pitchy air and thanked him warmly  
for the barley soup and the thick brown bread.  
After we’d eaten he showed me his treasures:  
an antler comb, a jar of salt, three iron nails.


	4. A Reprise

I am no longer living  
on a small pig farm  
in Iron Age Stansted  
but a country cottage in Wales

I have enormous sleeves  
Still as I somehow expected  
the inevitable advent  
of renowned statesman Edmund Burke

We are drinking tea together:  
Edmund Burke, myself and the lovely friend  
with whom I walk 16 labradors  
all with melting eyes.

The papers print terrible things.  
Edmund Burke places a reassuring hand  
on each of our shoulders,  
praising our esteem for honour, dignity of thought

and virtuous friendship.  
He climbs onto a shaggy pony  
then rises into the sky  
appearing in a halo of light

on the BBC News at Ten.  
He makes peace with the fifth republic  
and chews the ears  
of Nigel Farage.


	5. Congratulations To My Girlfriend On Finishing Her Government And Politics Course

On a humid neoclassical DC night  
an invisible hand clutches the sleeve  
of the Supreme Court’s most frequently sarcastic member  
Justice Antonin Scalia.

Leave the Americans, a voice whispers,  
leave them as they anciently stoooooood.  
Justice Antonin Scalia would agree,  
had these words not come from 1773.

Luminously out of the polluted air  
the gleaming shoe-buckles of tradition appear  
and the ghostly Magna Charta’d cuffs.  
Society is a partnership between those who are living

softly argues the voice …and those who are…  
deaaaaad. Silently, Justice Antonin Scalia  
steps into Nick Carraway’s elevator,  
and the unknowable dark.

Sunlight awakens him, and – It is not  
what a lawyer tells me I may do  
but what humanity, reason and justice tell me I ought to do.  
from the pillow opposite.

Like Psyche with her lamp, Justice Scalia  
flees horrified from the revealed visage  
of the Seductive Insufficiently Conservative Ghost  
of, inevitably, Edmund Burke.


	6. An Actual Dream

I dreamed – I really did – of Moses Mendelssohn.  
Terrible monsters had come out of the sea. That good man  
waded out with the star-sharp spear of his logic  
the sword of his tenacious faith, his dear friend Lessing.  
Together they lifted the mighty arm of Pope Ein Metaphysiker!  
and dealt the beast one knockout blow. Reluctantly  
it sank back beneath the North Sea foam,  
and the streets and the Academies of Science  
were garlanded around the world, and everyone,  
happily, wept.


End file.
